Austinist Interviews John Vanderslice

They're looking to get Roe - they're looking for the big score now. This is going to be the big tipper. They just saw something that looked more like a Souter and less like a Clarence Thomas

In Texas we have an upcoming vote as to whether or not to constitutionally ban gay marriage -

Jesus. Well, this country's gotten more social conservative - it's very odd since that's not what should happen. People should be getting wealthier. We live in a first world, hyper-capitalist, secure, wealthy nation. We should be getting more progressive, more educated, more kind of ... settled.

Only it's not happening. It's not happening in these places we're talking about.

Well, actually, it's getting worse. Real wages are flat. With a lot of the [metrics] for measuring poverty, this country's really getting poorer. And that's part of the agenda there, too, to keep things fragmented. [There's this] whole thing about frontage roads, I'm really interested in the idea that there are these frontage roads, and it's so Texas - it's so divisive, it's such a fucked up, piece of shit way to design a city. To have a highway, and to have a frontage road, and to have all these crappy, box stores.

Whom do you see running in '08?

Well, it's interesting. I think Bill Frist was definitely going to run, but now he's having ethics problems. It's just like a sports game: if their side is injured, and our side has this dark horse candidate that just comes up... It's going to have to be a centrist, you know? I mean, Clinton was the master. It might have to be a southern centrist.

Ever thought about composing a movie soundtrack?

Yeah. If we had a movie with a budget, yeah. It all comes down to money, because now that I have a permanent entourage, it's a balance between creative integrity and getting everyone paid. The best case scenario is something like Explosions in the Sky getting asked to do the Friday Night Lights soundtrack - an incredible soundtrack for an above-average Hollywood film. But in general, the kind of emails and correspondence we get are from super low-budget, mellow indie filmmakers ... with zero budget, who are five years away from being at Sundance or Toronto.

My policy is to let anybody use anything [of mine] that they want. I'm the open source guy. I mean, I've always let people remix stuff and take tracks and re-use them. I just think it's kind of maybe it's over-inflated when [other bands] are trying to hold on to their [music]. Mostly they're paranoid because they've been scared by entertainment lawyers or labels.

How do you go about selecting your setlists each night?

I let Ian or Dave do it. I don't care. We've been tweaking it every night. We play about 24 songs, about an hour and half. It's a long show! The last tour we played an hour set, and it's been going up.

[Laughs] It’s going to be a sit-down, three-hour show eventually.

Oh yeah, that would incredible. String players, full orchestra. I mean, that's the way I really want to go!

You’re pretty famous for being a huge cinemaphile. Care to name some favorite directors?

I'd say that someone I'm really interested now is PT Anderson. I'm really excited about the projects he works on - the day his movies come out I'll go see them. Other directors ... Godard was huge for me, Preston Sturges, John Ford, William Wilder, Fritz Lang. I started getting into these 1930s and ‘40s directors.

Yeah, but it's hard to get ahold of those older prints. The Drafthouse here recently got their hands on a gorgeous print of “Metropolis”, which they've been showing with a live soundtrack provided by a local DJ.

That's cooool.

Yeah, it's next to impossible to get that experience of watching such a masterpiece on the giant screen.

Absolutely! Although, Turner Classic Movies on cable. I mean, that's a bad ass channel. They've done a good job in restoring those movies. If you've got a nice TV, it can work out.

[We don't have a TV.]

So you made a rather strange comment in a past interview, claiming that most musicians were slightly autistic.

Oh yeah, I got a lot of emails about that.

 

Let’s dig a little deeper on that.

I think that there's something that I've seen with musicians - they have a very difficult time with the way that most people move between being introverted and extroverted. Musicians are usually so extroverted and there's so much output that sometimes they just shut down. And you just literally become passive... it's happened to me.

One, it's overload, two, I think ... like an autistic kid, they tend to be hyper-developed in one way. They tend to be savants, like they can be really good at math or one skill.

So perhaps it's that they're focusing so much of their energies on creating?

Yeah, it's like reserving the strength for one thing. I mean, some musicians that I know - they're kind of retarded. You know what I mean? I’m like that in the same way, too. They're spacey, they're limited.

Like our keyboardist, he'd be the first to admit that he's a total space cadet. But he's the best in the band.

Well maybe it's like an adventure game, where you only have so many points to work with, and you have to divvy them up accordingly -

Exactly.

The same could be said for writers, artists -

That's right, absolutely.

With autistic kids you see this rhythmic, kind of rocking movement. I got a really interesting email from a girl whose brother is autistic, and she remarked that my comment really described how her brother was, that the way he communicated was he'd get into these rhythms and he couldn't stop it.

That must be the reason why people get into music in the first place. They feel like they have to channel some -

That's exactly right, they have to channel.

And I guess some people eat the same breakfast everyday?

[Everyone laughs]

Do you still believe that digital recording is a bad idea?

Well, I have HD in my studio, and I still think it's pretty bad. I think that Avid is bad in terms of the digital resolution. There are better companies with better converters; there have been more progressive and enlightened companies leading the charge.

Avid is Guitar Center consumer junk. An HD system that costs thirty thousand dollars still sounds pretty bad. My argument has always been that analog, at that price range, is not even close. It's not even a little tweaking, like [affecting a high-pitched nasally voice] "Oh, there's a high end here!", like nerd stuff. It's very, very profound.

So I think that the gap is still there. HD is a disappointment, for a lot of people.

Yeah, well, here's the thing. I design things like that as my day job, analog to digital converters -

Dude, that's awesome.

Sure! But thing is, that's coming from your consumer standpoint, where you know what it should do and what it shouldn’t do, what it's used for. On the other side you have the engineers who are designing it and have no idea what applications these things are intended for, and that's the problem. There's that gap.

Well the thing that happened with analog is that it was perfected over seventy years. And most analog gear sucks, it's just that in seventy years people figured out a great deal. And digital obviously doesn't have that same amount of breathing room ... yet. It'll be great one day.

You're right, because at the end of the day, it's all still finite. You only have so many “bits” to work with.

Yup. Someday, someone's going to make a workstation that actually has style and sounds great. It might happen in two years or five years. But if I'm going to make a record today - and a lot of bands come to me and they have a budget where they could make a great sounding analog record, but they end up making a record that's a hybrid or a purely digital record, and I can hear it across the room. I'm like, "whoa, man, that top end ..." it’s just so cheap-sounding. It sounds woolly and muted and there's ... nothing to recommend about it. And it's not like people save by [going] digital.

There are really good digital recording devices out there, especially for electric/acoustic pieces. But classical is where it suffers the most.

Which is also where people are the most critical. Also, with classical music there's no sense of introducing deliberate distortion, so you end up listening to exactly what you're supposed to hear.

Yeah, the top end of string ensembles is so complicated, there's so much stuff up in the 25-30k range.

Do you feel that musicians who are actually aware of what's happening in our nation, and feel seriously enough about their stance - do you feel like they have a responsibility to engage their audience, tell them what’s going on?

Yeah, I think you have a responsibility to be engaged in the world, you know what I mean?

Well, sure, everyone does.

Yeah, and I think that especially at this point - I mean, these are end times. This is fucked up. I mean, I just drove across the 10 from Florida all the way to here, and it's like - we're building new roads in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this fucking highway is a fucking joke. i mean, I've been on better roads in Thailand, Bangladesh - countries that we think of as being third world. I mean, what the fuck! How much gas tax or sales tax do people pay? I mean, it seems fairly simple. You have the 10, 40, 60, 90. They were paved decades ago. Can you fucking pave them?

At the same time, it's, admittedly, a monstrous task that takes several years. And if you can't finish it in four years, why the fuck should an administration care? They won't see the results come November.

Yep.

So you seem like a happy person. But your records are sad.

I would say that I've had mild depression my whole life, just like any other singer-songwriter. I would say that most of my life has been absolutely defending myself from the onslaught of depression.

Do you think that perhaps with your music, you're able to -

-Get rid of it? I wish that it did, man, believe me. I think that that the manic-depressive cycle of being a musician makes it worse. I think that if I was married and had a kid and a house, I’d be a little bit more stable.

In your music, there's a huge emphasis on narrative, but at the same time, you make a deliberate effort to distort things ... do you think that this somehow confuses the message in your songs?

Well, I think that what I'm always shooting for is having an unreliable narrator, so you can’t necessarily identify me as the narrator, and you can't also identify the narrator as telling a story that contains a parable, or a myth, or a lesson.

You have to actively piece together components of the story. I love that tension. I think that's really interesting. Like in “Plymouth Rock” - I feel, personally, that anyone who goes to war and shoots at somebody they don't know is a criminal. I think that you're a fucking war criminal. That's my position, right? Especially if you're [from] a first world country, fighting an asymmetrical, pre-emptive war with forged intelligence. That's my position. But -

I actually totally empathize with the private who steps off the gunboat, or the helicopter and gets shot in the head. I do, I really feel that for a lot of people who've been pushed into the military. So the tension there is that you know where I'm coming from, but here's this poor fucking sap who's really looking forward to killing people, and he's got his head shaved, and he's like ready to go. And the actual reality of what he's doing, which is fighting a fucked-up guerilla war in a country he's never even seen - he has no concept of what he's doing. It's some biblical war that Cheney, Rove, and Bush have concocted. And it's that tension that I think really, hopefully, makes the music interesting, to have to poll the audience, to let them figure it out.

Images coutesy Barsuk Records, (c) Piper Ferguson